The mayor plans to introduce legislation to the D.C. Council that would require the city’s chief medical examiner to investigate all instances of maternal mortality, her office announced Tuesday. Those investigations would provide more timely data to D.C.’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee, a 17-member group that started working earlier this year to identify trends among these cases and come up with a plan to improve outcomes for pregnant women.

The legislation takes that effort a step further. The Investigating Maternal Mortalities Amendment Act of 2019, as it will be called, is necessary to ensure all of these cases are reported promptly so forensic death investigations and determinations can be conducted by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, according to a press release. It guarantees that “timely and accurate medical insight is available to not only grieving families…